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Countdown to Christmas: Day 10 - Misadventures of Mark's Childhood

 So it's a short story, but there was something kinda funny I did back in high school that I'm not sure anybody in the family knows about... It's also fitting, because it has to do with Rubiks, who, after a long and hard life of 17 years, was officially "put out to pasture" just a few weeks ago for a big ole' insurance payout.

Like all the other Kennedy kids, I drove Rubiks back and forth and all over State College to the high school. We had all iterations of the Kennedy kids driving together, and I think at some point, all us kids were the designated Rubiks driver. He was a good solid car, with 4-wheel drive, and a reliability that is unique to Toyotas and Hondas, which was always helpful in the winter months when the snow would come down pretty hard. 

Now, this might be a little hard for my family to agree with me on, but I feel like I'm a pretty safe driver. Sure, I brake usually pretty suddenly, and I like to speed, but for the record, I have NEVER had an accident. In fact, one of the only times I've been hit was I was taking a nap in the back of Rubiks while I was parked at the Bursley Dining Hall roundabout, and this kid, trying to pull out of his parallel parked space, just tapped the bumper and put a little dent in it. I think Daddy got like $500 for that one little thing(:

The point is, when it comes to driving, I generally try to employ caution. Of course though, there are brief moments when the chase of a thrill overcomes your basic instincts...

In PA, our house had this looooong swopping driveway that snaked up the mountain, through a line of trees, and then followed a graceful turn as you round the front of the house. I always felt like it was pretty picturesque, if I do say so myself. So after a long day at high school, I'm driving home, trying to be careful going up our driveway cause even in a 4-wheel car, the angle of the mountain plus the turns can be kinda tricky, and I hit that picturesque turn - turn right out of the grove of trees, and then a swooping left turn into the garage right?

Well the beauty of the snow, mixed with our nice house and the view, must have inspired me, cause all of a sudden I decide to try and drift that long left turn. I figure, it's a long, steady turn, it doesn't have any sharp drop offs on either side or anything, and there's just a thin layer of snow on the ground, so with my 4-wheel drive, I should just drift a little bit and stop, or drift gradually, and be able to take the whole swoop with the car lined up perpendicularly to the road. THis was my Tokyo Drift moment(: *cue the theme music.

So I accelerate, pull on the emergency brake, and turn the wheel at a semi-sharp angle to the left. And it goes well at FIRST. Turns out though, a thin layer of snow is either pretty slippery, or there was ice on the driveway, cause I quickly realized I wasn't turning with the driveway, and starting to aim off to the area next to the driveway. 

And that's when I realize there are a line of small saplings we had planted years before, lining the driveway....

Repeated attempts to pump the brakes were fruitless, and I end up running DIRECTLY over one of said saplings. Obviously not having really seen this as a result of what I was doing, I braked with the car directly overtop of the sapling, as it's bent trunk and leaves are scraping the car underside. For some reason, I get out of the car (the tree still crushed underneath) to check the state of the tree, see it's almost uprooted, jump back in the car, and finish driving over it, with it snapping back up with a rough-sounding twunk. 

After finishing the drive-over, I know I have to get out and check the tree. The problem is, that same swooping driveway I'm still on circles around the FRONT of the house, which means a LOT of windows. And a lot of windows mean a lot of potential viewing of what I've just done. So casually as I can be, with the car still standing on the side of the driveway, I get out and go up to the tree to assess the damage (about as casually as you can worry about something that you have practically never worried about ever before in your life). The first thing that was noticeable was a definite lean to the tree, in the direction that I bent it when I hit. Nothing a good little push in the opposite direction won't fix, right? Some branches were snapped and very clearly broken. I could blame that on nature. The big scratches along the trunk from afore-mentioned scraping? A little harder to explain, unless of course I started a rumor that PA all of a sudden had introduced a pack of wolverines to the surrounding forest, and they REALLY liked scratching bark off of young trees. I figured as long as no one looked TOO close, it wouldn't be TOO noticeable. 

I get back in the car, and finish the drive to the house. The problem now? I don't know if anyone in the house has seen what's just happened...

There's a weird anticipation, when you walk into a situation where you don't know what other people know. I walked into the house with baited breath, treading lightly, and trying to engage Mommy and Hannah and Glo cautiously, one by one, so that if one of them saw it, they can't blurt it out in front of the other two. My justification was that the tree LOOKED fine, and it probably wasn't hurt that bad, cause I only drove over it for like 5 seconds, right?

After about an hour of being home, I figured my secret was safe. And after all these years, and now that the statute of limitations has been lifted, I think it's okay to share my secret story of how I ran over a sapling at our PA house(:

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